It seems as though a ZDNet writer received some information about an error message that a reader ran into on a Microsoft site and decided to write an article about it. The article, titled "Microsoft.com error reveals IDs, passwords", unfairly attempts to shoot down Microsoft and the .NET technologies. It takes a friend of the author to save the article by pointing out that this error has nothing to do with problems inherent to .NET, it has to do with a programmer putting code into production that should not have been.
The code was left in debug mode which exposes lots of nice details to developers when errors occur, details that should never be seen by the general public. Aside from the debug mode issue, the error was caused by a variable not being declared. Why didn't this pop up in testing? The error prone code should never have made it into production. Perhaps I should apply for that job with Microsoft that was recently posted on one of the many job boards.